This morning I posted a rather lengthy blog entry that neared 2000 words. I had a lot to get out of my system after not having written for quite some time, and was shocked to see that within thirty minutes of my posting, I had a comment from His Bella. My assumption is that she found this blog through wordpress because her own blog is hosted through wordpress. She must even type as fast as I do!

I have not, for the record, dug back through my own posts, but I believe that I have addressed this issue briefly in the past. However, my thoughts have not been quite clear for quite some time and I believe I might have managed to confuse the issue more than clarify it.

I am going to start and end with complete honesty. Honesty is more than just my policy, it is my way of life. I want everyone who reads this blog to know who I am and what I represent in terms of the lifestyle that I live (though I won’t be giving out personal details. Sorry!). Anyway, here goes.

I have been interested in spanking and “impact play” since I was too young to remember. My first real memory of really thinking about the subject was when I was four years old. That should tell you something. This interest has been with me for so long that it is completely ingrained in my personality and who I am. I can’t escape it and it will always be with me (for as long as I live, I’m sure!).

When I was seventeen years old, I first got the internet. I found a chat room that interested me and began to do some internet role play in chat rooms. The room did primarily fantasy play, but it wasn’t long before suddenly spanking came into the picture in the form of internet age play. I loved this! I was getting a need filled that I didn’t realize was ever going to be filled.

As a result of my obvious interest, I was referred to #submission on Dalnet. I joined the channel and occasionally chatted there, but not nearly as much as I spent time in the previously mentioned room. Around the time that I turned eighteen, I posted some personals ads on various sites (including the old hotmail personals ads) and I met a man, a master. We learned and grew a great deal together just through e-mail discussions, and as a result, I got kicked out of #submission (they thought we were both the same person! What a riot!). I moved on to another channel, and it was there that I felt that I truly discovered and learned my true calling.

Age play and domination and submission are great, but they weren’t really fulfilling for me. I had my moments where age play really helped me to reach a cathartic point not through sensation, but through the attached emotions. I just loved it! However, what I discovered in that second Dalnet channel was the Gorean way of life. It wasn’t explained to me in that way at the time, but I quickly adopted the mindset of a slave, and it stayed with me for a very long time. I sought out men who considered themselves dominant or “masters” and I sought out a few women who considered themselves “mistresses.” I ate it up, and when I really discovered Gor (for real), I truly felt in my element.

Please understand that I have never been attached to the “fantasy” element of Gor. I don’t do any services that involve fantastic food or drink (the food and drink of Gor) but my mindset was and has remained that of a Gorean woman, whether that woman is in bondage or not. I felt at home, and I felt filled up with something that was a dream come true. Though I have never been in a “real life” relationship with a Gorean man, I have known several (in real life) and have yearned for it for a very long time.

When I first met my husband, he was interested in BDSM and the master/slave power exchange, but not in Gor. I fell in love with him, but felt frustrated with his disinterest in what meant so much to me. I saw the potential in a strong dominant personality, and I saw the potential to get my attitude and defiance under control. Gor took away the necessity to be submissive in order to be a slave. I could be dominant and still be a slave, and I loved that!

The problem was always my desire (not need, but desire) to be in control. I was bratty, and I believe that my husband gave up hope. I felt that he wasn’t taking control, and would hand out and withdraw my submission and consent on such a regular basis that it embarrasses me now. I was in the wrong place during the wrong point in my life, and I had forgotten why I was there in the first place.

I haven’t always been a Christian. In fact, until about eight months ago, I was a very determined pagan who believed that I was right and the rest of the world could go to hell. I would never have phrased it quite that way to anybody, but that’s how I felt. I won’t go into how and why things changed for me, as I’ve done that already in other posts (two, I believe).

The conversion did a few things to me. The first thing was that it made me angry. Suddenly I saw myself identified as a woman, and as a woman as less than my husband. I lacked understanding of my role within my relationship with my husband and therefore fought tooth and nail for what I felt that I “deserved.” There is that selfishness again, right?

However, after several months I began to think again about domestic discipline (something that has always been present alongside the master/slave power exchange for us). I joined some groups, did some talking and some reading, and began to understand what it meant. I will have to copy and paste a post that I made in my myspace blog to here to give you an idea of what I mean by the change, particularly as the real change occurred only over the weekend!

My mindset has been gradually changing, and I have gradually come to understand myself, my place in the world, and I have learned to identify myself differently. I no longer identify myself as a slave, or even as a woman: I identify myself as HIS wife. It’s specific, because each relationship is inherently different, and there are things that make us unique compared to other couples. Every household is run differently. It is important for me to identify myself as his.

Anyone who has participated in the BDSM or the master/slave world might understand that last sentence. I am HIS. My identity is AS HIS. Our dynamic is no different than it was before, but our closeness and my identity is different. One other thing that has changed is that rather than both of us being self-focused, we are learning to be centered on one another. This is an improvement in our relationship FOR US. Your mileage may vary, of course!

The master/slave dynamic is still there, but there is no power transfer as there used to be (I hate the term exchange because it isn’t accurate in terms of BDSM). Instead, we have a true power exchange. He empowers me through his dominance and I empower him through my submission, in particularly when this submission is given to him as a gift rather than out of obligation.

His Bella suggested that I am a dominant. First of all, I am a grammar freak and don’t accept dominant as a noun (I’m laughing here, so you should be, too!). It is an adjective. Am I a dominant woman? Absolutely, positively YES. However, I choose to behave in a submissive manner because that is what is pleasing to my spouse and what I crave deep within my heart.

The belly of a wife can burn just as brightly as the belly of a slave. We just use different terms!

A lot of things have been going on with us lately, and I have been so exhausted with other projects that I haven’t taken the time to truly share here, in my blog. In many ways I haven’t wanted to, and in other ways I have just felt as though there was nobody reading and listening to anything that I had to say. I think that this is an unfortunate testament to my personality: I give up too easily!

We have experienced some life-changing events of late. We have been very close to the ending of our marriage due to attitudes and behaviors that are harmful to it. I believe that we have both been entirely too fed up to deal with one another and to live in harmony with one another. Neither of us has been happy, and we have each been treating the other badly. The end result has been what I now see as a power struggle which has resulted in hurt feelings across the board.

There is no shortage of advice for frustrated wives who’s husbands aren’t treating them as they would like to be treated. It comes from various sources, including blogs, websites, forums and groups. There is no getting away from it, provided that you’re actually making an effort to save your marriage. Books scream it, forum members preach it, groups often seem to shove it down your throat. The answer is inevitably that the wife, the woman, needs to be more submissive, needs to be more this, needs to do more of that. We hear so frequently about “love in action” and are given specific examples of how we can exhibit it.

I’ve read several books, I’ve joined several forums. I have gotten advice, and I have struggled to put it into practice. “Your actions determine how you feel” is what the books teach, what my husband preaches. Unfortunately, for me, it doesn’t work that way. My actions aren’t leading the emotions: the emotions are leading the actions. I often get caught when I am not feeling well or I am feeling particularly tired. In short, my defenses are low and I am emotionally weak during these points in time. I have discovered that these are the times that my husband is most likely to leave me to “work things out” myself. He thinks he is teaching me coping skills. Unfortunately, what he’s doing is destroying our marriage by inciting anger in the name of teaching me something. I apologize for the strong wording, but this is true. If you will bear with me, I’m going somewhere significant with this.

God knows everything about me. He knows my lack of coping skills and He understands my personality. He is very aware that my actions rarely lead my emotions and that I have been unable to make this work for me. I almost never wake up in the morning with a smile on my face: I am a stay at home mom, I wake up exhausted!

For a long time, because I do stay at home with our daughter and do most of the care for her, I have felt stressed and unappreciated (this is common, I think). I have been aware not only from the way that my relationship works, but from my readings of the books (some of which are listed on the left) that the wife’s feelings are insignificant to her husband’s feelings. I have felt put-out and undesirable, as though God Himself doesn’t care enough for me to protect me not only from my husband and my marriage, but from myself.

Before I proceed, I want to re-iterate that it has been years since I claimed to be a “great” submissive or a “true” submissive (I hate this term anyway). Those who have claimed this of me must be thinking of somebody else. I am not naturally submissive in the least. I struggle with submission every hour of every day of my life, submission to my husband and submission to God. I’ve mentioned this in almost every group I’ve ever joined. I know that this is a struggle for me and I am honest enough to admit it. So if you’re one of those who has been on their high horse and e-mailing me about how I’m not who I say I am, suck it up and move on to your next victim! I’m done with you!

Good to get that out of my system. Now I’m moving on. Thank you for bearing with me!

I’ve been desperately wrong about a lot of things in my marriage. There were things that I didn’t see and things that weren’t revealed in the books, forums, groups and magazines. As yet, I haven’t run into this “problem” in any of the books, forums or groups that I have read unless I’m the one who has brought it up (and only very recently).

The problem isn’t a lack of submission; it isn’t a lack of service: it isn’t a lack of a smile on the face; it isn’t gossip and it isn’t language; it isn’t lack of love; it isn’t a desire to hurt my husband: It is a desire to get my own way one hundred percent of the time.

Sound familiar? If you’re in a struggling marriage, it probably should! Think about it: What woman doesn’t want to get everything she wants all of the time? Who among us has never (and I mean never in the strictest sense of the term!) tried to manipulate our husband so that we would get our own way? How many of us are able to cheerfully submit every single time that our husbands make a selfish decision? How many of us are truly happiest when his needs are met and our own aren’t?

My needs haven’t been getting met. I accept and see love in so many different forms that it shouldn’t be difficult to hit one of them at least half of the time, but my husband has been struggling with this. He has been struggling to put me before himself. When we first returned to domestic discipline, this was one of my single greatest fears: that he wouldn’t be able to put me high enough on his mental list to take care of me. Because of his selfishness I didn’t trust him, and I could hardly live with him. I was always on my guard to see what bad decision he was going to make for me next, based on his own wants and needs. I guarded my heart against the wrong thing: my husband!

What a tragedy!

I have been so busy keeping track of my husband’s “list” that I haven’t paid any attention to my own. Where does God come on that list? My husband? I can’t honestly say, though I know that my behavior has demonstrated that I am in the number one place on my own list. My daughter probably comes in second, with God and my husband further down. I know that they both place, because I pray, and often pray for my husband. However, these two need to be in the number one and number two slots on that “list.”

I have prayed, and wondered why God hasn’t been answering my prayers. Could it be that my heart hasn’t been in the right place for a long time? Could it be that He isn’t answering me because I am so busy trying to answer myself? While God does help those who help themselves, He also helps those who put Him first in their lives.

I have made a mistake. I haven’t been tithing of my own time, or tithing in my marriage, or tithing in anything else that is important to me. I haven’t been letting God in, and this has been an enormous mistake. I haven’t been following the two laws which Christ gave us: to love God above all else and our neighbors as ourselves.

Some of this might have come out of a lack of understanding, but primarily I believe that it has come out of selfishness. My needs haven’t been met in a way which is helpful to me in so many years (since I was a child) that I have always had to struggle to get my needs met and to meet them on my own. My trust has faltered as a result of this emotional sensation, and I have developed such a difficulty in putting anybody else’s needs before my own that I have essentially “screwed myself”.

When my husband first lost his job, I blamed everyone. Where was God when this horrible thing happened? Where was His provision and His protection? What on earth was He doing for ME (number one!)? How could He allow such a terrible thing to happen to my family?

Over the course of that evening, and through talking to one of my friends from one of the forums that I am on, I began to sense a change in my heart. The tension in the house had been palpable and thick, and gradually it began to evaporate. I could feel my husband relaxing for the first time in more than a year, and I felt myself beginning to calm down and feel a sensation of inner peace that seemed to permeate throughout the entire house. In the course of an hour (literally!) everything changed between us.

Isn’t it amazing how quickly this can happen? I will write about that later, I am sure, but for now I want to focus on what happened that night, and what changed in me.

I have spent the last several days focusing on the needs and desires of my husband. I have asked him at least half a dozen times every day “what can I do for you?” If I anticipate a need, I meet it before he can ask or before I can ask and be told “no.” The service and selflessness is gradually beginning to return into our relationship, from both sides (his and mine).

The submission still isn’t perfect. While I am submitting, I am not giving my submission. I think that I will be able to get there, though, with time and a lot of concentration on the new developments within my heart. I am learning to pray more effectively for my husband and learning to meet his needs before my own. In so doing, I am learning again how to trust him to meet my needs.

This is an amazing discovery and an amazing journey. Thank you for being willing to share it with me!

I have been, for whatever reason, avoiding the BDSM context within my life, and avoiding discussions of such as well, but following this post by swan I can hardly get my thoughts together or maybe even force myself to understand.

I want to have some detail writing here, and try to connect with a part of myself that is definitely very much alive and well, but I also don’t want to be judged for the decisions that I have made, either by the “vanilla” community or by the BDSM community. Please do bear with me. This is going to be difficult.

First of all, by definition I am not a masochist. Pain does not bring me pleasure in any sense of the word (although at one point it did) and I prefer to receive that pain from a voluntary giver, rather than coercing someone into committing the act that brings the pain about in the first place. So no, I am not a masochist.

Admittedly, the biggest problem that I have in my own life is my self-discipline. This is not something that was particularly fostered in me when I was growing up, and I have fallen out of sync with myself and my own rhythms over the years as well. Something certainly needs to change. I need to develop a heart that cares not only for others but also for myself. I need to work internally so that the change can be shown externally. I cannot care for others if I fail to care for myself.

Have I posted about this before? I’m sure that I have. But I have found myself getting off-track with what I want and what I need. It is something that my husband and I need to discuss in detail as well, at some point in the future. Hopefully we will be able to get together on the same page and he can assist in keeping me on track.

I am going to go through a process with this post, so I really hope that those reading will be able to bear with me and see me through this. I believe that this post will be helpful not only to me, but also to others who are experiencing domestic discipline or Christian domestic discipline for themselves.

I understand that there are people who are critical of domestic discipline, and I understand that there are a variety of reasons for them to feel the way that they do. Often, I feel that these individuals are bitter women who have yet to find peace of their own, and therefore criticize the type of peace that is obtained by other individuals. Sometimes they attack a particular site (mine has been that site on at least one occasion, if not more!), and other times they attack domestic discipline in general. Usually it is “Christian” domestic discipline that gets attacked. These people believe that we as Christians shouldn’t practice this type of behavior.

These individuals are entitled to their viewpoints. However, one thing that really gets my hackles up is the use of absolutes on their statements. “Christian domestic discipline is abuse” instead of “Christian domestic discipline could become an abusive situation in some relationships.”

I just got back from a trip home to visit with some friends who were (and are) having a rough time, so please bear with me if I have spelling and grammar errors. I’m a bit worn out from the trip, especially considering that I wound up in the completely wrong state! Anyway, back I am, to posting as well!

Over at Being a Head of House I found an interesting post regarding positive reinforcement. This is something that I have had a lot of cause to consider in recent weeks.

I have been working harder at general household things. I’ve always been terrible about doing the things that I know I should. Honestly, I felt as though someone else should be doing them for me. When I was growing up, many of those skills weren’t learned because I had no role whatsoever in keeping the home. I felt (quite unjustly) that my husband should do at least half of the work at home, in spite of the fact that I am a stay at home mom!

This is the first part of a series that I’m beginning to work on for people who are new to DD and in particular CDD. Please provide any feedback you feel would be helpful and let me know what you feel I can do to continue to help those who are new to DD. Thank you in advance!

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I try to be an observative person. I follow a blog or two and am a member of several domestic discipline forums and groups (most of which are listed to the left). All too frequently I read about people who are new to domestic discipline and are feeling frustrated about one problem or another that they perceive within their relationship. While once in awhile you’ll hear from a frustrated man, most of the time these frustrated individuals are women.

The vast majority of the frustration I see is caused by an inconsistency by the head of household (HoH).

I need to get into a routine. I joined flylady.net recently (I think I might have mentioned this several times by now!) and I can’t even seem to stick to the baby steps. Trouble is, I know my tendency to burn out.

Last week, dear readers, you might have noticed my mention of having cleaned the bathroom thoroughly. Well, it was acceptable, and I’m discovering that I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my bathroom and my bedroom. If no other two rooms of my house look decent, those two rooms (which often enough nobody else sees!) must be spotless. How frustrating!

At any rate, I shined the bathroom sink last night (as I said) and that got me started. I was bored later on in the evening waiting for DH to come home from work, so I followed that up by cleaning the toilet and the mirrors, as well as wiping down the other surfaces. It wasn’t great, but it was acceptable.

I have only just posted something and then realized that I wanted to say something else. That is why I wind up making several posts in one day, but I figure that it’s good that I’m posting at all rather than just letting the blog sit here and do nothing. When DH reads this blog, I think that it helps him to understand me better, but he doesn’t read as often as I’d like, and he never comments (either in person or in the blog itself). I have to confess that this bothers me somewhat, but I’ll get over it in due time, I’m sure.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about tonight is accountability.

For me, I’ve always wanted it. Asking for it, the first few times, was easy. And yes, there have been a few times that I have made a push for true accountability in our relationship, but it never really stuck. My husband would tell me that a spanking was warranted, I’d tell him it wasn’t, and he would back up. I was failing to submit.

If you haven’t read part I, located here, you might wish to do so now. Thanks!

Following from the previous post, I hope that it is understood that I am a Christian. My husband is also a Christian and our children are being raised Christian. We attend our church weekly (and sometimes bi-weekly), participate in group and individual Bible studies and spend regular time in prayer. We are a Christian family.

That being said, I want to elaborate on personal beliefs that are held by myself and I believe also by my husband.